Building Wealth is broken

[rfcfanatic]

Sorry about the rant, but I really feel that way. When I say "City governor, I want you to build Wealth in this city. Now it's up to you to get the best out of it" then what actually happens is the opposite. The incompetent governor starts to work as little as possible! And of course, when building Wealth does as little as reducing the negative run from -200 to -195 , it's easy to conclude: "Hey, this stuff is utterly useless! Even a Bank in a 5 city is mathematically more efficient (with all sliders at 0%)!". If it were not broken and the negative run went to -150 , of course I would be like: "Hey this stuff is really amazing!".

Of course, there is a way to manually manage tiles to overcome this. But why should I have to do the job of city governors and control every single tile in every one of my 20 cities? A CEO hires subordinates whose job is to deal with the little details so he would be less distracted from the bigger picture of company development. But if a subordinate happens to be incompetent, he would simply fire the subordinate and hire a more competent one.

Unfortunately in civ 4 there is no way to fire incompetent city governors That's why I prefer Markets and Banks over building Wealth, because at least these are not broken

 

[Manco Capac]

Vranasm once asked me the same core problem and I took a look into the code what really happens.

It happens that when you choose to convert hammers into research, wealth or culture, the code considers that action a "process". You process your hammers into a commerce type of output. The thing is output values are weighted differently. Food is superior to hammers and hammers are superior to commerce. When you impose wealth while governor, the governor attributes the citizens to the highest valued tiles first until the number of citizens runs out. But because you do a processing of your higher valued hammers into lower value commerce, the governor will calculate high food tiles better than hammer rich tiles because food is two levels better in value than your processed hammers.

In the end, it is not broken. Just an unexpected response for a human player. You see, the governor is actually the same for the AI as we borrow their script and it IS good that the AI's are being favored to value food because that is their only way to compete against a human player.

I have heard someone has fixed the problem...can't recall since it has been months ago. I suspect it is fixed with K-mod.

 

[Tlalynet]

TBH if it switches to commerce tiles it's probably being more efficient than turning hammers into wealth.

In the long run the food is way better too if you can afford the happy cost, but if you're building wealth you're probably looking at the right now rather than the long run...